Dooley Takes the Fall

One of the things that happens when you don't read back cover blurbs--which I don't, I hate how much they give away--is that occasionally you're surprised by what a book is really about. When I picked up //Dooley Takes the Fall// the one word that caught my eye was "trouble." So I thought it was going to be one of those issue books where the hero/heroine has terrible troubles that they have to try to work through. And it is. But it's much more than that. //Dooley// is also a suspenseful mystery with a touch of romance thrown in. And mostly, it's a very good read. It's obvious from the very beginning of the story that Dooley is a kid who's seen trouble. Ms. McClintock laces the opening chapter with clues that Dooley not only has a troubled past, he has a complicated present. But rather than dump the truth on us, the author slowly doles it out, in dribs and drabs that hint at just how much trouble Dooley has caused for himself. And it's a measure of her abilities as a writer that when we do find out what Dooley did--and it truly is awful--we don't lose sympathy for him or judge him. Instead, we understand how his miserable home life, his fear, and his determination to not screw up again have combined to get him to this place. I loved the depth of characterization in this novel--Dooley himself, his tough-but-fair uncle, and the distraught Beth--and how the author manages to delineate a character with just a few lines ("His uncle stared at him, still waiting. Dooley's uncle was good at waiting, good at making the other guy fill up the spaces and maybe even incriminate himself with the filler talk.") And because the author has given us so much insight into Dooley and the other characters, we care about and agonize along with Dooley throughout his story. And I love that the author doesn't give us any easy answers, doesn't try to sugar-coat the difficulties that Dooley must face as he tries to take control of his life again. Overall, I thought this was an excellent story and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, //Homicide Related//.

"Nobody told me there'd be days like these." -- John Lennon "Dooley was looking down at the kid sprawled on the asphalt path in the ravine when two things happened. First, Dooley's pager vibrated. Dooley knew without checking that it was his uncle trying to reach him. Second, a boy maybe twelve years old, on a bike, stopped next to Dooley, looked at the kid lying on the pavement and said, 'Is he dead?'" Teenager Mark Everley is, in fact, dead, having gone off a bridge (Fell? Pushed?) under the evening's full moon. Seventeen-year-old Ryan Dooley was out walking, after leaving work at the video store, when he looked up and saw Everley, in the distance, taking a header toward that asphalt path. "'Mark Everley,' his uncle said at last. 'The kid who went off the bridge.' He shoved the newspaper across the table to Dooley. 'You didn't tell me he went to your school.' "'I thought I recognized him,' Dooley said, which was true. 'But his head was kind of smashed up, so I wasn't sure' which wasn't true, but it sounded a lot nicer than saying what he was actually thinking (It couldn't have happened to a more deserving person), which would have only annoyed his uncle. 'Anyway, I didn't know that was his name and the cops didn't tell me,' which was also true." Dooley has come to live with his uncle after spending significant time in confinement for an incident involving a baseball bat. He has only been attending this school for a few weeks. Dooley's uncle is a retired cop who now owns a couple of dry cleaning stores. Dooley's father has never been in the young man's life. Prior to confinement, and his current residency in his uncle's house, Dooley had grown up bouncing around with his substance-prone mother from place to place and school to school. Inch by inch, we come to know that Dooley has a significant measure of goodness and compassion in him, and that Dooley's past behavior has sometimes been unforgivable. But the questions to be puzzled out in this great YA crime mystery include: How does Dooley fit into the death of Mark Everley? What will come to pass between Dooley and Everley's beautiful sister? How does the young illegal alien Esperanza fit into the mystery? And what can Dooley possibly do to alter what comes to seem like an inevitable path toward re-incarceration? "The main reason was the feeling in his gut, the one that made everything churn, even milk and cereal, the feeling that in the old days he would have warded off with booze or pills or weed or whatever was handy. It was the same feeling that used to creep over him when he was a kid and all alone in a dark room, listening for noises out in the hall (doors opening, footsteps approaching, hammering on the door) or in his mother's room next to his. It was the feeling that came on him when he got called on in school and he didn't know the answer and kids would look at him like he was stupid. It was the feeling that however bad things were now, they were about to get worse."